


Curse of the Moon

by The_Untitled_King



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Big Moon Gay, Introspection, One-Sided Attraction, Wayward Protagonist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 07:43:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20503346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Untitled_King/pseuds/The_Untitled_King
Summary: Moonlight illuminates the truth, but is the way forward the true path for Diana, weighed down by the ghosts of the past?





	Curse of the Moon

The nights on Targon are cold and lifeless.

Little moves on the dark rocks stretching out into the sky, reaching for the stars above. The flutter of small insects occasionally rise towards the clouds, but rarely close, and never beyond.

Diana rested her khopesh against her knee as she stared up at the moon, its radiance unimpeded by the clouds below. There was still quite a ways upwards to reach the summit of Targon, but she was content where she sat, leaning against a wall of stone. She bathed in the light, letting it cascade over her body, against her skin and filtering through her hair. Her eyes were closed, she was, if for however briefly, at peace beneath the lunar presence. She could sense the sigil on her forehead reply to the celestial mother, feeling the light fill her, pouring into the scars she had suffered at the hands of the Solari, wounds that went deeper than flesh.

Wounds that she was sure would never heal.

A cool, skyward wind blew past her, and she breathed into it. She let her eyes get lost in the stars and moon above her, wandering between the glimmering lights without direction. Her hair flared up with the wind, dancing until the gust calmed and her silver locks fell to her back.

This was nice.

Out here was the only place she could be alone with her thoughts.

She looked up at the night sky, a black sea with barely any clouds for islands to break the waves of moonlight and starlight. A spare part of her mind began to wander, imagining a bridge that connected the mountain’s peak to the heavenly empire above it. She considered her place on the mountain, whether she would seek to ascend once again and become one with the empire. There were no more Lunari, not truly, nothing to hold her to the mortal plane, she could rise and become one with the Aspect of the Moon. The solitude would be pure, she could be whole.

However, that was not the only place she considered.

Perhaps instead she would descend, tilting her head down and seeing the embers of civilization at the foothills and lower cliffs. She was still human, she could return and share the lessons of the Lunari amongst the people, bring them back, renew them.

Am I ready for that, restoring the Lunari? Is that truly my path?

It had been months after she had left the Solari, and Diana felt that she had been in limbo. No direction, no path. The days stretched out and even the nights were a barely sweetened tedium. She had developed a cyclic devotion to her routine, observed by the eye of the moon.

Closing with the crescent for secrecy, open with the fullness of truth.

Though, it was more than just the moon that observed her, Diana remember with grit teeth. She rose to her feet and found her bearings, ready for the trek back.

The return to the temple had been uneventful, so practiced that she could do it with her eyes closed. The lacklight of the night was of no issue to her, the moon always guided her, even through thick clouds and heavy fog. She used to slip and stumble between the crevasses, more than once almost falling to her death at the fickle whims of the mountain.

Yet she never faltered, never failed, and she was stronger for it.

Since her exile Diana had endured more than she had dreamed possible. The least of which were the mountain, and her sworn duty as an Aspect’s Chosen to defend it. Bandits and those with untoward intentions for the summit were one thing, easily dispatched with her blade and the power within her. The random, erratic voidborn and their spawn were another, each time proving a dear threat to Diana’s safety and her sanity. The toll taken with each gruesome, gory victory was palpable, and she could still remember the first time she had survived their invasion.

Kneeling on bloodstained stone and soil, painted with the innards of her foe beneath the full moon. Body aching with the strain of battle, and the wounds she had suffered. Tears streaming down her cheeks, and a skyward shriek of rage.

Burning with seething hate.

The hate towards her enemy, chitinous and squishy, polluting the sacred mountain with their pooling blood.

The hate towards the Aspect, and the celestial empire that thrust forced responsibility onto her shoulders.

The hate towards her old kin, the welcoming falsehood of the suns faith and worship.

Only one of those hates still lingered, still festered within her heart, rotting from the inside out. It was a rot she was more than content to bear.

Yet even that weight was not what caused her the most stress.

It was as she returned to the closest thing she had to a cultural home, in the ruins hidden behind the moonlit door. This is where she had found the armour she now wore, where she had found herself. She still had a few hours spare of night, to enjoy the drops of moonlight piercing the cracks in the walls and illuminating the crumbling pillars and worn murals in the pale silver of the sky. She had done her best to restore what she could, and there was pride in her work.

Though it was not enough to ward off what haunted her most, even in the heart of her home.

She knew the sound before it made itself known, stepping through the crevice in the mountainside and into her beloved ruins. Fingernails tap-scratching at the back of her mind, echoing around her skull, and the voices that followed.

The worst part of her new life.

“…Yes, I can hear you.” She said quietly, closing her eyes and pressing her hand against the wall to steady herself.

The echoes of her footfalls bounced back and again off the walls, each reverberation seemingly intensifying the voices.

“Please, just…one at a time.”

She stumbled, catching herself against the wall. In the moment of tension, her other hand immediately went to the haft of her khopesh, hanging at her side. The whispers seemed to drift away as she stood back up, only to return immediately.

“I…stop, just…I will hear you all out.”

Her words did little to quell the surge of the lost Lunari’s voices.

The chamber was near-silent, only the scrawl of ink and char on paper and the soft breathing of the writer could be faintly heard. The stories she had heard and recorded were now piled up countlessly around her, the only true marker for how long she had been here since her exile from the Solari. Tales spoken in whispers and booming yells, all within the confines of her skull. She could never escape them, so she at least endured them, one by one, name by name.

What the Lunari had been, what they had meant. Careless stories of day-to-day life in the temple, and opulent tapestries of song and script in service to the balance they shared with the Solari of the time. A rich history, lost, stamped out in the hopes that they would be forgotten.

Diana grit her teeth as she pressed the quill into the page, scribing the chant that the current lost voice of the Lunari whispered into her mind. They would never forget, and she would ensure that the world remembered too.

After what felt like hours and many pages later, the words eventually faded away, losing clarity to the endless hum of the whirlwind-chatter inside her head. She sighed and leaned back into the stone, closing her eyes and letting her arms fall to her side as she waited for the next of the forlorn.

It wasn’t all terrible at least.

For every bitter soul that had seen the last light on their tribe as the sun-worshippers slaughtered them, screaming for vengeance and scorn, there were older ones who gave Diana the gift of tranquillity.

Often, Diana had some of the best conversations of her life with them.

She spoke regularly with a Lunari girl named Batria, and rather than expunging histories into Diana she allowed her to discuss and speak in turn. They shared stories of their time as younger acolytes, though Diana could only describe her experience as a Solari, and stealing away in the night to gaze up at the moon.

“Did the elders know?”

“No one did.” Diana had said out loud. “It was my secret, my place of peace.”

“Do you think you would have wanted to share it with anyone?”

Diana’s chest fell heavy as her mind immediately conjured up the answer to Batria’s question. A flash of gorgeous auburn hair, shining in the light of the midday sun. Even in such a hazy, long-aged memory, the image was clear, the swell of emotion in her breast almost too much to bear.

It hurt to remember, but Diana was afraid to confront it.

“…No.” She had lied, grateful that her thoughts were at least guarded to the Lunari lost. “There was no one.”

Other than the empty tomes of the library, where Diana found herself for hours either trying to find something still intact or adding to the collection with the memories of the lost, there was another place she spent her time in. In the deepest recesses of the sanctuary, buried high into the mountain, was a hollow, segmented pillar, pocked with stairs winding between the levels.

A skyward, underground tower.

When Diana had first discovered the structure it had almost taken her breath away. The artistry behind each column and well, woven into the walls and floors with the care and precision that only years of honed skill could create. The tower itself was filled at intervals with reflective crystals in the shape of interlocking gears, marking the walls in deliberate tapestries in honour of the Lunari and their icon. The gears spiralled and lead towards the summit of the tower, where a great black clock crafted from steel and iron was housed, the surrounding architecture carved into the surface of the mountain wall and allowed light to pour through from the outside.

The hole it created was definitely big enough to be seen from the outside, but Diana considered that it may have been the same ancient magic that hid the temple to begin with that was keeping it a secret.

It was beautiful, but with no hands or force to set the gears in motion it remained as silent as a tomb, perhaps too fitting for the legacy of her people.

Diana considered it fate then, that the night following her discovery had been one of a full borne moon. The rays streamed in through the clock and danced off the gears until they found her standing on one of the lower levels. She felt it flash in an instant, the Lunar Aspect within her igniting the gears with Targonian magic, and the tower creaked into motion.

The moonlight clocktower was alive, and Diana felt the spark of the Lunari lost quiver in joy. It lit up, the hands above echoing with each tick. The engine breathed, like a great, temporal beast, and proved life with each and every clockwork reverberation. She stared up and let the moment consume her as tears welled in her eyes, the resounding echo from the lost filling her ears.

We are not dead. Our Chosen is here.

However, despite the ringing echoing the sentiment of the dead, the pendulum swing could only toll to the emptiness of the temple. The Lunari were once and are no more, and it would be Diana’s responsibility to rekindle the culture.

She herself wasn't sure if she was ready to take that mantle.

Diana woke from restless sleep, fingertips scraping at the walls as she roused and rediscovered her bearings. Even so early, so quickly into consciousness, the lost Lunari began to speak to her.

“Please…just a moment…” She begged, brow furrowing and warping the branded sigil in her forehead.

The voices calmed and the majority of them fell silent, those who remained in clamour quickly quietened by their siblings. She could still feel their presence weighing down her mind, but at least they were no longer shouting. Diana stretched out, letting her bones click into place and waking up her muscles. The cool air of the temple brushed against her bare skin, and she exhaled, ready to begin the day.

She made it halfway through her morning meal before the dam of voices cracked, and words trickled through with increasing volume. The last bite of her food left unfinished, she placed her hands in her head, and considered what she might do with her time. There was no disturbance swirling on the mountain, no ordained heralding of the Void’s invasion for the day, the Aspect would have told her. The sky itself was half-curtained by clouds, slowly spiralling into grey. She supposed, with a sigh of resignation, that it would be another day scribbling away in the archives.

Diana sat as the lunar clocktower’s heartbeat echoed through the temple, seconds passing with each gentle tick as they swam through the stone. Blank pages stacked in front of her, ready to be filled with char memoirs.

“Why do you suffer us so, Diana?” Batria asked as her voice surfaced, several tens of pages into the day.

“Someone has to listen, someone has to preserve us.” Diana’s hand hardly slowed as she spoke.

“You don’t. You could be out in the world doing anything, anything at all. You’re only here because the Aspect chose this for you, you didn’t.” There was a pause, unacknowledged by the chosen of the Lunari. “There’s so much out there for you, things to see and people to explore. You could fight for whatever you truly wanted to, or live a life that you choose for yourself.

“I chose this!” Diana snapped, her voice a crack of thunder piercing the quiet. “I climbed the mountain, I accepted the Aspect into myself.”

“You know as well as I do that the forces of Targon are beyond us. There’s no telling how-”

“Do not take my accomplishments from me!” She shouted back. It echoed around the chamber, silencing all other thought, silencing Batria’s voice and the cacophony of the others behind her, and Diana shattered the char in her hands, tearing the paper between her fingers as she clenched her fist. When the echo quietened, all that was left was her anger and each heavy breath that punctuated it.

Batria realized too late that she had struck a nerve. “Diana, I-”

“Do not speak.” She said in a flat tone. “Do not say a word. Do not try to make me give up the only things I have left.”

Diana could not reconcile the tempest of anger in her mind. It blunted her psyche, hampering everything but her ability to traverse the treacherous slopes and narrow pathways lining the mountain. Within her skull the fury swirled, fresh anger at Batria’s words and old angers that she thought she had let go of. Her weapon was clutched tightly in her hand as she navigated through Targon’s waistline, neither heading up nor down, aimless until she could find some direction.

The mountain itself howled in a rare life, a whirling tempest of lightning and rain twisted the heavens, obscuring the peak and the celestial bodies beyond. She sought shelter, still too full of vitriol to return to the Lunari temple. She would face the cold and rain if it meant she could be alone with her thoughts, even if the din of the water made it difficult to think at all.

With a grunt she cast her hand out and wrapped herself in a shield of solid moonlight, swirling around her. It was a mundane use of her powers, but at least it would keep her dry as she headed lower down the mountain. The downpour battered the curve of her shield, but unless she could suddenly cast away clouds entirely, she figured there was nothing to be done.

Damn them all. She smashed her heel into the earth, landing heavily as she navigated a winding cliff.

The moon was hidden behind the storm, but she knew its shape regardless. Its eye was closing, sharpening into a crescent sliver as the cycle turned over. Tomorrow would be the night it would be the thinnest, almost not there at all, before drawing back out into its open state.

Slowly, despite the pounding rain, Diana felt her mind clear. The anger began to slowly seep away, returning to the recesses of her mind where it came from, unwanted. With clarity, she paused her march and breathed, reassessing the thoughts Batria had forced to the fore of her mind. The other girl was right, in a sense. Being the sole survivor of a dead culture, taking on the weight of its entirety alone was too much for anyone, even for one of the Chosen of Targon. Diana’s words in response to her had been more born of pride than of fact, a desire that she had some agency beneath the empire of the stars, and that she was worthy of her place in their annals.

There had however still been truth in them.

If not me, then who?

The Solari had seen to it that the Lunari were wholly buried, Diana was the only one who could unearth them. She had already been listening to the lost who still haunted the Lunari temple, already reconstructing what had been lost to the blind faith. Spending her days and nights between reviving the lost through record, and her one-woman crusade against the Void.

Those acts were not enough.

It would be endless, she would die clinging to the past and barely holding onto the present. She had to move forward, to embrace her role.

No one else.

She considered her place and how to move forward from it. The Lunari temple had been scoured clean by her time and time again, there was little more she could learn from those halls. The lost were still a font of knowledge, but filtering through them to find what was worthwhile would be a tedious exercise.

Before Diana knew it, she realized that she had descended lower than she had intended to. Wrapped up so tightly in her own head she had failed to notice her position on the mountain, or that the rain had stopped. She dispelled the lunar shield around her and took in a breath of fresh air, letting it fill her lungs before she continued her train of thought.

Her brow creased as she realized a decision had to be made. She couldn’t just stay as she was, running in place for the rest of her life. She had this power, had earned it herself, and she had to do something with it.

This far down the mountain she could see the lights of the Solari temple in the distance. There were only a few, and even those were dimming as she watched, for the Sun’s faithful had no love for the dark comfort of night. Feelings stirred in her chest as her resolve built, bumping against the old emotion that she still couldn’t quite bury.

She wiped her mind of that particular radiant vision and focused.

An idea took shape, slithering and rising in her mind. The Lunari temple had little left, but the expansive labyrinth of archives suggested that once there had been a trove of knowledge. Surely the Solari hadn’t purged it all, they would have stolen some for themselves and hidden it away.

No, it was a cultural genocide, they wouldn’t preserve our history if they could just wipe it out.

Still, there was a little voice in the back of her mind, tugging at doubts. The Solari were savage, but they weren’t stupid, it said. There was a suggestion about holding on to the Lunari’s knowledge, preventing others from finding and using it, or perhaps even abusing it for their own ends. Diana shook her head, but the serpentine notion would not subside, and she found herself ascending back to the Lunari temple, seeking answers.

“Diana!” Batria’s voice was the first to call out as Diana entered the temple, immediately flanked by scores of the others. “Are you alright? I’m sorry for-”

“I’m fine, and you are forgiven.” She cut through Batria’s voice, her own words weighted with exasperation. “For now all I need from you is silence.”

The other voices rose in turn, seeing it as their chance to get a word in. They spilled over one another, flooding Diana’s senses as she walked deeper, entering the central hall for the temple; a hollow, pillared circular room, with a mural of the lunar cycle ringing the floor.

“I said, silence!” She shouted, slamming her boot down against the stone. As her decree echoed the voices in her mind stilled, and the haunted lost fell quiet. She could still feel their presence within her, around her, waiting with bated breath. “Those who died to the hands of the Solari, I want to hear your voices.”

Immediately, a cemetery’s fill of personalities surged forth, all crying for their words to be heard above the others. Diana grunted and raised her voice once again, gritting her teeth.

“One at a time!”

Eventually the swirling dust settled, and a select few made their presence known. In the central hall Diana could almost imagine them standing across from her at the other end of the mural. For a moment she felt intimidated, felt as though she was standing across from venerable, wise elders that she should respect.

Respect?

These Lunari had been just as bad as every other when it came to insisting that they be heard. Diana steeled herself and glowered at the minds image of her forerunners.

“When the Solari killed you all, what did they do to our culture?”

There was an unsure quiet in response, and Diana felt like she had to clarify.

“Our books, our histories, everything. Did the Solari destroy them, or steal them away?”

The quiet persisted, but this time it was peppered with hushed whispers between the lost, until they collectively turned to address Diana.

“Chosen, what are you suggesting?”

She sighed. “I want to rebuild the Lunari.”

The whispers swelled, almost bursting the balloon of silence that Diana demanded, and it was only her stern expression that kept them in check.

“If the Solari stole our legacy rather than destroying it completely, then it would be worth considering that they still have-” She was cut off as the tension burst and a concert of voices erupted in fervour.

“Yes!”

“That’s it! That’s-”

“They didn’t just murder us, they stole our culture! It is our right to-”

“There must be secrets with the Solari, Chosen, you must reclaim them!”

“Take back what is ours, and rebuild!”

“Please, Diana! Do-”

“Do it for us! For the Lunari!”

The crowd grew and grew, shaking the foundations of Diana’s mind. She swore her skull was becoming looser with the raucous ethereal sound, and she raised her voice to quiet them once more.

“Enough!”

The crowd stilled, waiting for their speakers verdict. Diana groaned and stretched the muscles in her neck, loosening them. There were several things she wanted to say and ask the lost, almost too many to organise. At the forefront of her mind however, was the infectious enthusiasm they had displayed. It had been the first time they seemed positive, happy even, and unified. She wanted to be a part of it, she wanted the things they were saying to be true, a chance for the Lunari to rebuild and to take back what was theirs. Diana felt her chest swell with the pride of belonging, feeling the raw, vibrant energy that the lost were exuding.

This is what it meant to be Lunari.

She would retake their heart. 

\------------------------------

The next night fell as cold as they always did, and with the moon bearing its eye almost closed there was even less light than usual. For Diana though, what the moon offered was more than enough to see the truth of her path, and for the first time the mountain felt alive to her.

Diana knew what she would do for the sake of bringing back the Lunari. She would retake what had been stolen, then she would parse it, develop and understand it for herself in a way that she could share it with others. She would embark to the foothills of Targon, and the surrounding region, and even the world if she had to, to find any possible scattered remnants of her culture and to seek those who would be willing to join her.

She looked up at the moon, taking note of just how slim its crescent was, how sparse was the light it cast. She would be a shadow, a ghost, and the nocturnally-inept Solari wouldn’t be able to detect her. It was the perfect opportunity.

The Chosen of the Moon grit her teeth and squeezed the hilt of her weapon, staring at the sky. She took in a deep breath and let go, thinking about what was to come, and what was ahead of her.

“This path will be long.” She said out loud, reinforcing her resolve to herself. “But I cannot turn back.”

The Solari had gotten sloppy. A glut sense of laziness seemed to radiate throughout the mountain-carved temple as Diana made her way through its halls. She could not hear anyone else stirring at this hour, no guards, no mischievous acolytes, not even a wayward snore. Perhaps, she considered with a growing annoyance, they were so confidant in their safety that they had fallen into a smug languor, seeing no enemies that could threaten them at their most vulnerable.

Regardless, it gave her the chance to explore the halls without trouble, and she would take the blessing for what it was.

The voices of the lost still echoed in her mind, spurring her on, even if they were not truly there beside her. Her footsteps were silent, each poised movement in perfect balance to ensure that her armour gave nothing away, she may have well been walking on pure moonlight.

She noticed a noise just as she approached the doorway to the archives, pressing herself tightly against the wall. Everything was quiet for a moment, then it appeared again, a shuffling, tired gait from within.

A guard?

Diana didn’t take the time to see, she simply waited for the noise to move far enough away before silently stealing into the library, quietly keeping to the shadows.

There was a strange, mingling sensation in Diana’s chest as she made her way between the shelves and walls, following the path back to where she had first discovered the Lunari, tucked away in a bookshelf towards the back of the archives, hidden, but not hidden well enough in the first place. It bubbled of a familiar nostalgia, a warm, brewing emotion that stirred memories of her time as a Solari acolyte, starkly against the cold bitterness of the history between their people. She let her palm graze a corner as she passed it, smearing a thin layer of dust onto her fingertips.

She smiled. She was getting close, and there was a little humour to be found in that the Solari still struggled to keep the further reaches of their temple clean.

Another corner, another short corridor between dusty shelves, each step bringing her into darker shadows. She needed no torch to guide the way, the light of the moon was all she needed to see what was before her. As she moved past each tome she briefly scanned their covers, marking them with the power of the Lunari to see if they may be pertinent to her search.

They were not, but she was now only a few steps away from her destination. Tucked away at the far end, no candlelight or windows near to illuminate it, was the place she had first discovered her people. She felt a sense of reverence as she got down on one knee, placing her hand against the edge of the same shelf she had found the script.

Against her best efforts she could hear the sound of her own breath, ragged and uncontrolled. She forced herself to close her mouth and quiet down, scanning the shelves with her eyes, the brand on her forehead glowing as she began her search for the truth.

It’s here.

She started from the bottom, the power of the Aspect allowing her to see everything from the outer covers to the wall.

It has to be.

The truth would be revealed.

Her eyes rose with each row, and she stood up as the rows got higher. It was only as she reached the end of the top shelf that her heart fell, and her eyes widened in the gloom.

No.

She scanned it again, the glimmer of her lunar branding growing brighter as she intensified the disclosing light. Down to the cracks in the walls, down to the splintered wood, down to the dust sleeping on the covers and between the pages.

There was nothing.

Frantically, Diana turned on her heel to inspect the other shelves nearby, looking at already-marked spines and grabbing between them to see if there was something she had missed. Her breathing became ragged, no thought heeded to subtly and quiet as she shuffled noisily in the dark. She let more moonlight out, enough that another could see it if they saw her, desperately fumbling against the archives for answers.

With each scoured bookshelf her heart fell further, teeth grit as she retraced her steps slowly along the archives. The low ceilings and tight walls of the back reaches gave way as she explored more towards the centre, becoming frustrated.

They couldn’t have purged all of our histories. We meant more to them. It’s not-

“D-don’t move.”

A warm light grew behind her, polluting the purity of her pale glow. She brought her hand down from the scroll she had been reaching for, resting it on the hilt of her blade and slowly turning. With a deep, scornful scowl Diana looked at the owner of the voice, her eyes blackened and her face cast in hard shadows by the light emanating from her forehead brand.

It was a young boy, surely still in his teens, with unkempt hair and the eyes of an irresponsible sleeper. He wielded a straight-edged sword in one hand, bearing the sigil of the sun just above the guard, and held a lantern of sunlight in his hand. It flickered weakly, and as Diana stared him down the light dwindled even more.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“You don’t know?” Diana replied, her tone flat. The boy didn’t respond. She looked at him, making a noise of disdain. “Get out of my way.”

She took a step towards him, her light drowning his, and he lashed out. Her gauntlet rose to catch his blade, knocking him over with a blast of moonlight in counterattack. He fell with a pained gasp, pressed up against the towering archive case behind him. Diana drew her blade and pressed it up against his throat, looking down at him.

A moment passed as he strained for air, still gripping the sword but only with frozen fingers.

“Where are the Lunari scriptures stolen from my people?”

He stayed silent as he tried to catch his breath against the curved edge of her sword, pressing his back into the wood behind him. Diana’s frown deepened, and she slowly twisted and pushed her weapon against him until she drew blood, prompting an answer.

“What…what are the Lunari?”

Diana felt her temper rise. It was only for an instant, but enough to leave the rest of her psyche smouldering with a low anger. The moonlight around her burst out, momentarily uncontrolled and uninhibited, cast into the cracks and corners of everything surrounding them. The acolyte before her screamed, shielding his eyes, even as her light returned into her. It coalesced, binding to her armour and to her khopesh.

The elders are still hiding behind their lies. How dare they continue to hide and deceive the truth of my people. How dare they.

“Please, let me go.” She heard the boy plead. He was afraid, trembling, his eyes still tightly shut from the moonlight flare.

He is innocent, before even my time. She lowered her blade, just slightly.

He is Solari. Another part of her replied, and she raised her blade back up to his neck.

Noises clamoured from outside, echoing in and pulling Diana out of the moment. Alerted by the Aspect’s power the Solari collective had awakened and rushed to the source, rousing in the sunless hours of their counterpart. A lethargic battalion hallway of warriors approached her, clanking through the archives towards her.

It pained Diana to come up empty-handed and to escape with the weight of failure pulling her down, but it was better than being captured and letting the Solari kill her. She drew her weapon away from the young boy and grunted, considering her route. She still remembered the layout of the archives, but with the storming Solari there was little chance she could sneak out.

By force, then.

She recalled enough of the Solari temple to know which direction to face, which wall was thin and would allow her to slip out into another hallway. Bathing her curved blade in moonlight and striking the wall with it. A broad slash now hollowed the stone, just wide enough for Diana to dive through it and leave her pursuers behind. She landed in the adjacent hall with a rolling tuck, quickly rising to her feet and running, dimming the lunar glow around her.

By now the alarm had been raised, and she could not rely on the meagre moonlight peeking in through the openings carved into the mountain wall, meant for the daylight. Diana knew she had to get outside, and there even the near-closed eye of the moon would grant her enough power to take on any threat the Solari could muster.

Almost any. Her heart reminded her.

She shrugged the auburn thought away and ran faster, boots echoing on the stone. Her footfalls were joined by a collection ahead of her, and a trio of under-armoured Solari warriors emerged from one of the side paths. Without breaking her pace Diana charged her power, blazing forth and colliding with the closest of her enemy. She heard something crack under her impact, accompanied by a yelp of shock as the body was thrown back into one of its companions. The leftover warrior made to swing their weapon downwards at her, which Diana neatly sidestepped and replied with a deep pale strike of her own.

The mingled sounds of tearing flesh and screaming barely registered to the Lunari, even as her blade scraped bone, she did not slow her stroke.

The cut was clean, flicking blood over herself and her foe as Diana seamlessly returned to her running stride, continuing on. She would not hesitate, would not waste time looking back. Her path was forward.

The mountain hollow eventually opened up into a tall courtyard, shaped into the rock and climbing into the sky. There were walls all around her, scraped and goldened with the tapestries of the Solari and their iconography. They reached up into the sky, far enough that Diana had to crane her neck to see the twinkling stars and peeking moonlight over the rim. These muraled walls were too smooth and bare to scale, even with her power, and there was only the way at the opposite side of the clearing.

The way out.

Blocked by the steel of the radiant sun.

Diana’s heart skipped a beat and she caught her breath as it escaped. She slowed to a standstill, lowering her weapon but keeping it ready. Her body tensed for just a second, then relaxed, struggling to settle.

From behind sunrise curtains of hair, the Chosen of the Sun watched her with an impassive look. She lacked the ceremonial glamour of her armour, bearing an exclusively functional attire of plated metal. The midnight rise did not give her enough time to dress as her position afforded, but she was as guarded as she needed to be around the former Solari. Her eyes gave away little as she watched the silver-haired woman, no scorn, no pride.

Yet her gaze was too intense to be impassive. There was meaning behind those near-golden globes.

Diana inhaled a breath of confidence. “Did you know I would come this way?”

“The Sun guided me.” The words turned her stomach, but coming from that voice, sweet and warm, it was enough to chip at Diana’s resolve, and the Lunari had to clench her teeth as she dredged up her strength.

“So you followed it, blindly.” Diana accused.

“And it led me to you.”

Diana was silent in response. Leona’s eyes moved down, tracing the Lunari armour until they rested upon her hooked blade, wet with blood. Her brow furrowed, and she looked up with a quiet judgment.

“Tell me, is that the blood of one, or of many of my people?” The warmth from her words had dipped into an uncharacteristic coldness.

Diana’s fingers gripped the khopesh tightly, leaning slightly forward as she replied. “I was defending myself. I-”

“There’s almost no one here who could be a threat to you, Diana.” The way Leona said her name was sharp enough to make her flinch. “I know how you can fight, you could have disarmed or evaded them without too much trouble, even without the power of the Aspect. You chose to fight back and kill.”

“The Lunari were wiped out!” She screamed, echoing around the walls of the mountain around them.

Something had cracked in Diana’s mind, trickling into a stream as the stone dam of emotionality she had built up slowly cracked, owed to Leona’s presence. It was sudden and fierce enough to cause even Leona to flinch, and Diana saw as Leona’s grip almost imperceptibly shifted to one ready for combat.

The waters of anger continued to run, increasing with each second. “How many hundreds of my people died at the hands of the Solari? How many children, Leona, cried as the last thing they saw were the faces of your people, people that they trusted?” Tears welled in her eyes, and the waters flowed faster. “Can you tell me? I know the answer. I hear them every day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I collapse from exhaustion in the early hours of your sun.”

Leona looked genuinely shocked, her stance had softened with vulnerability as she tried to empathize with Diana’s pain, struggling to fully grasp what the Lunari was sharing with her. “Diana…”

“Don’t! Don’t you dare! I will not mourn the life of even one Solari, not one! I came here to find some hope for the future of the Lunari. A chance to rebuild.” She breathed deeply in, letting her emotions continue to mount. “There’s nothing, is there? Your people erased everything about mine, didn’t they?”

“That was before my time!” Leona shouted back, not wanting to lose Diana. “I would have never condoned such actions, you know I wouldn’t!”

When Diana replied, her voice had become low and seething. “Then why have you met me armed and armoured?” The dam was almost empty, the wrong side of her mind was drowned with emotion. “Why…”

She didn’t struggle to stay strong, but her mind was in disarray. Just seconds ago she had been ready to attack and kill anyone who would have tried to stop her, so full of pure fury that she swore her light could have turned red. Now, she felt exhausted, the dam broken and slowly repairing itself, and all she wanted was…

“The Lunari don’t want war, they just want to live.” Diana said with a heavy sigh. “Together with the Solari, or separate.” She tilted her head upwards, letting a thin column of moonlight illuminate her face. The forehead brand glowed with resonance, and her tears glimmered as they fell to the stone below. A stab of pain pricked Leona’s chest as she saw the state of her fellow Chosen.

“But…what do you want, Diana?”  
It was only a half-second answer as Diana’s eyes turned down from the moon in the sky to rest on Leona. There was a reverence, an adoration that she couldn’t hide even if she had declared it from the centre of her rage. She blinked and lowered her face down to a level position, inhaling to recover.

“I want the same.” She said, declaring a covered truth of her desire. “I failed tonight, but that will not stop me. The Solari will not stop me, the monsters on the mountain will not stop me.”

Leona gathered herself and struggled to harden her expression, raising her shield and taking a step forward. “Diana, I can’t let you leave.” She whispered quietly.

“Please, Leona, don’t stand in my way.”

She didn’t want to, and yet she tightened her grip on her sword, readying herself to battle. Even with the surrounding night giving Diana an advantage, even with the unnamed tug in her chest trying to pull her from doing this, she knew she had to uphold the Solari. “Don’t resist.” She said softly. “I will do my best to make things right for you.”

Diana’s heart twisted over in anguish as she watched Leona approach, but she knew she had to respond in kind. She raised her blade and readied herself, struggling to steel her resolve. This was the last thing she wanted in the world, there had to be a way out.

Leona struck first, thrusting at Diana’s shoulder with her sword. Diana dodged away and made no attempt to counterattack, giving Leona the chance to blunt her with her broad shield. The Lunari wrapped herself in a sphere of hardened moonlight, absorbing the blow as she was forced back. Still, she refused to attack, and Leona swung at Diana’s chest, forcing her to block it with her sword.

She caught Leona’s blade with the hook of her own, turning it over and deflecting it away. Even as her momentum was forced against her Leona didn’t stagger, easily returning to form and aiming another attack at Diana’s sternum. It was deflected again, and Leona raised her shield to blind Diana with a blast of her inner sunlight.

Even as the silver-haired fighter closed her eyes, the attack disoriented her enough for Leona to land a strike with her blade. She felt Leona’s incredible strength through the weapon as she was thrown back and it left a deep mark on her armour, but not as deep as she expected.

She’s…Diana realized as the distance between them was momentarily widened. She’s only attacking where my armour covers, and not even at full strength.

Her chest swelled, and Diana had to force herself not to smile at the knowledge. It gave her the courage to stand back up with a new plan and raise her blade to the sky, prompting Leona to halt her advance.

No words passed between the two as Diana’s blade slowly lit up with moonlight, becoming increasingly brighter and too difficult to look at. Leona frowned, then realized what her Targonian counterpart was going to do. She rushed forward to stop her, tossing her sword and shield to the side to lose weight.

The second seemed to stretch out, and was yet at the same time not long enough for either. Diana’s cold expression was a falsehood for Leona, just as Leona’s hard determination was a front bearing duty above all else. Their surroundings slowly darkened around all but Diana herself, as if she was sucking the light out of everything and into her blade.

“Stop, Diana!”

The world around them was flooded with blooming pale light, and Leona shut her eyes tight.

She swore that only seconds had passed before it all returned to normal, and she could open her eyes again. Golden light burst from her hand as she found herself alone, searching the shadows in vain for Diana, calling out for her.

\-----------------------------------------------

Diana sat upon a cliffside of Targon, watching the sun rise for the first morning in many. She was just close enough to the Lunari temple that the lost were quietly in the back of her mind, but the distance allowed her to dismiss them as she pleased. As she watched the sun crest the horizon she was joined by Batria, who quietly took her place at Diana’s side in her mind.

She wanted to ask questions, too many to fully organize. Most notably about the state that Diana had returned to the temple in the hours before the dawn, tear-stained and with a cracked breastplate, yet unharmed and calm, but she didn’t want to earn her Chosen’s ire by overstepping boundaries.

Only the wind broke the silence of the moment, gently swirling around Diana as rays of light carried a welcome warmth. Her face remained neutral, she had cleaned the marks of tears and had let her armour sit alone within her chambers, donning dark Lunari robes for the time being. Eventually, as the lower half of the sun began to appear, Diana spoke.

“I failed.”

Batria moved to say something, but Diana continued before she could.

“But I will keep moving forward. For the Lunari, and for myself.”

She leaned back into the stone as thoughts of the future swam through her mind, imagining what was to come. There were no doubts that the journey would be long and full of obstacles, but she would pursue it nonetheless. The foothills of the mountain was where she would begin, with or without the aid of the aid of the Aspect.

All that, however, would be for another day. For now she was content to drift and let herself enjoy the memory of golden-auburn, calling for her name.


End file.
